Mobile communications devices have become an integral part of society over the last two decades. Mobile communications devices are deployed to government personnel, and emergency service providers. In some applications, the mobile communications device is handheld, but in other applications, the mobile communications device may be more bulky, yet still portable, such as a manpack radio, as available from the Harris Corporation of Melbourne, Fla. The typical mobile communications device includes an antenna, and a transceiver coupled to the antenna. The transceiver and the antenna cooperate to transmit and receive communications signals.
Before transmission, the typical mobile communications device modulates digital data onto an analog signal. As will be readily appreciated by the skilled person, there is a plurality of modulations available for most applications.
For most communications devices, the transmitted and received signals are spectrally limited. In other words, the communications device operates within an expected frequency range, such as the ultra high frequency (UHF) range or the very high frequency (VHF) range. Because of the known operational characteristic, the communications device is usually designed to operate within the expected frequency range. Nevertheless, as communications devices have become more robust in the included feature set, some applications demand operating within multiple frequency bands, i.e. a multi-band device.
In some multi-band devices, such as the aforementioned manpack radio, the transmit/receive architecture may comprise a plurality of paths with respective amplifiers/receivers and antennas. To accommodate the multiple antennas, the radio device includes a plurality of antenna connection ports. Because of this, when the user assembles the radio device, the wrong antenna may be inadvertently inserted into a particular port. Indeed, this issue can be aggravated in devices with configurable or assignable ports (i.e. hot swappable antenna ports).